Books: Gum Boil & Toothache

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB (291 pp.)—Editedby T.S Matthews—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4).

One day in 1796, London’s Morning Chronicle reported a terrible tale. Naming no names, the paper described how a certain young lady of Holborn had “seized a case knife laying on the table” and “with loud shrieks, pierced to the heart” her “helpless infirm mother.” The jury’s verdict: “lunacy.” The Chronicle added a careful note: the report “that she has an insane brother also in confinement is without foundation.”

The sister and brother were Mary and Charles Lamb. Charles was a 21-year-old clerk in the offices of the East India Company—a fragile, stammering youth with a large head on a thin little body, pipestem legs, and a strained look about his eyes. As a result of a nervous breakdown he himself had spent six weeks “very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton.” But confronted with the hard-and-fast alternatives of taking care of Mary or committing her to an institution, Charles never hesitated. Until death parted them, brother and sister lived together like an old devoted married pair. During the long periods when Mary was sane, brother and sister wrote together (Tales from Shakespeare), and wined and dined almost every great literary figure of the day. When Mary showed signs of a fresh mad fit, they set off resolutely to the asylum together, walking arm in arm, weeping, and carrying Mary’s straitjacket.

Conceits & Quiddities. The strain left deep marks on the character and writings of poor Charles Lamb. He drowned his sorrows in drink, diluted his tragedy with splashes of nervous, tense humor, indulged in “conceits and quiddities” that might grate on some modern sensibilities. His letters make better reading than the essays he wrote under the name of “Elia” (anagram for “A Lie”). This selection by T. S. Matthews, onetime managing editor of TIME, is shrewdly contrived to show why Lamb was not merely pitied for his sufferings but loved as well for his goodness. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about Lamb’s terrible life is that it was jampacked with enviable and wonderful incidents.

To walk and talk with great men was as much an everyday thing to Lamb as rubbing shoulders with the demons of insanity. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge had written “what he calls a vision, Kubla Khan,” it was to Lamb that he read this great poem aloud—”so enchantingly that it brings heaven into my parlor while he sings or says it.” William Hazlitt, angriest of English essayists (“He avows that not only does he not pity sick people, but he hates them”), was another devoted friend. Percy Bysshe Shelley makes a brief appearance (“His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with”), and there is one glorious occasion when Lamb “dined in Parnassus, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, [Samuel] Rogers and Tom Moore—half the Poetry of England constellated and clustered.” Coleridge, “in his finest vein,” stole “all the talk,” and “I am sure not one there but was content to be nothing but a listener.”

Small Change. What did Coleridge say that kept “half the Poetry of England” listening in fascination? The maddening thing about Lamb is that he never bothered to record anything that was really important. “His pockets,” says Matthews, “were stuffed with smaller change,” causing him to jingle the pennies of his own life in preference to hoarding the sovereigns of greater men. Life with Mary circumscribed his sense of proportion and drove him into what he called “depressions, black as a smith’s beard.” Praised by his friends for his courage and devotion, he only answered tersely: “I stink in the midst of respect.” Only Mary’s misfortunes could lessen the pain of his own —which is why a wit named them “Gum Boil and Toothache,” each being “a great relief” to the other.

For 33 long years Lamb dreamed of retiring from the East India Company and devoting his retirement to literature. But when at last the dream came true, he found it more nearly a nightmare: he was bored to tears. Mary grew madder, Charles grew sadder—and Londoners became used to the undignified spectacle of drunken Charles being “absolutely carried home upon a man’s shoulders thro’ Silver Street, up Parson’s Lane.” nearly falling off but “by a cunning jerk” regaining his balance until “deposited like a dead log at Gaffar Westwood’s.” He chafed under the increasing constraint that heralded the approaching Victorian era. He died in 1834, aged only 59 but thankful to have seen the last of a “damned, canting, unmasculine, unbawdy age.” Mary, ten years his senior, outlived him by 13 years.

The difficulty with Lamb is to see him whole. Some see only the mischievous little drunkard who “taught one little girl to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards,” tweaked William Wordsworth’s nose and addressed him as, “You rascally old Lake poet!” Some see him as an overelaborate, rather cute stylist; others brush aside what they feel are merely trappings and hail Lamb as one of the kindest, most generous men that ever lived. Editor Matthews manages to include all these Lambs in his selection and to write what is probably the truest, briefest epitaph: “His friends loved him: his friends still do.”